Startup culture is ripe for satire. The tech industry’s social and economic dominance makes it a necessary target, and its penchant for jargon-heavy, wildly inflated rhetoric makes it an easy one. Mike Judge’s HBO sitcom, Silicon Valley, deftly picks the low-hanging fruit, but it hardly needs to. The elevator pitches of most weak-to-average startups on the venture-capital trail, quixotically ascribing revolutionary potential to the most[…..]

Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Nicole Lane reviews Jillian Mayer: Touchers at Aspect/Ratio in Chicago. Jillian Mayer’s first solo exhibition in Chicago, Touchers, features two photographic works and a video installation[…..]

The constant stream of digital information traveling around us over wires and airways is an increasingly recognized phenomenon. Over the past two decades, many artists have begun exploring the seemingly limitless possibilities of digital communication. However, long before the integration of once-mysterious electronic media into the art world in the 1990s, William Larson used a Graphic Sciences DEX 1 Teleprinter to produce some of the[…..]

The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself. — Umberto Boccioni, et al, 1910 Todd McDonald’s Visual Feedback at Redux Contemporary Art Center addresses new modes of processing and viewing digital images as part of a painting practice. McDonald collects photographs of architectural elements and urban landscapes in[…..]

O bitter is the knowledge that one draws from the voyage! The monotonous and tiny world, today, Yesterday, tomorrow, always, shows us our reflections, An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom! —Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage (1861)[1] Despite the seemingly endless portrayal in the media of increased violence around the world, statistical analysis suggests that, as a species, humans have become less violent.[2] I wonder,[…..]

Surround Audience, the latest triennial exhibition at the New Museum, surveys fifty-one emerging artists, from twenty-five countries, whose practices are informed by their lived experience immersed in the digital landscape. The triennial has always billed itself as a predictive rather than reflective survey, and this iteration is no exception, with a focus on the culture of the immediate present and where it’s hurtling. Though the[…..]

Annexed by Russia in 1782 during the reign of Catherine the Great, Sevastopol became an important naval base to the Russian Black Sea Fleet only to fall decades later to allied British, French, and Turkish troops during the Crimean War (1853–56) after a long, protracted siege that lasted eleven months. During the existence of the Soviet Union, the famous fortress city was transferred to the Ukrainian[…..]